“I’m going to be working it,” Romney said Friday on Fox News, echoing the campaign’s new mantra. “I’m going to be earning it.”
At campaign headquarters here, top aides acknowledge the unlikelihood that Romney could become the Republican presidential nominee by acclamation — an even dimmer possibility now that Gingrich has emerged as a real threat.
But where the former House speaker has momentum and enthusiasm, Romney is counting on mechanics and regimen. Where Gingrich talks confidently of being the nominee, Romney and his aides are quietly plotting to bleed him dry in a marathon battle.
Romney campaign manager Matt Rhoades and his lieutenants have spent the past year building the bandwidth they believe they need to squeeze every advantage out of what one aide called the “byzantine” nomination process. With rivals fortifying their positions in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, Romney’s team has been announcing volunteer networks in such places as Delaware, Indiana and Montana, where contests occur months after the trio of early states.
The Romney campaign believes organization will be particularly critical because of changes in the nominating process. In the past, the winner of a state — or, in some cases, the top vote-getter in each congressional district — won all the delegates. But in 2012, most of the 30 states that hold contests before April 1 will award delegates proportionally. The ones that will come after will still be winner-takes-all.
That means a candidate could lose a number of states but still remain competitive in the race to gain the majority of the 2,427 delegates at stake.
As a reminder to take the long view, Romney’s political director, Rich Beeson, walks around headquarters carrying a matrix in his pocket charting which states award delegates proportionally and which are winner-takes-all.
“We’re not Kentucky Fried Chicken,” Beeson said. “We don’t have the luxury to just do one thing and do it right.”
Down the hall, campaign lawyer Katie Biber keeps a three-inch binder at her desk with memos, each marked confidential, detailing the deadlines, signature requirements and fees to get Romney’s name on the ballot in all 50 states, the District and the five U.S. territories that will hold nominating contests.
Biber recently dispatched staffers to Illinois and Virginia, whose primaries are not until March, to gather the 3,000-5,000 and 10,000 signatures required, respectively, to qualify for the ballot. (Romney’s team aims to gather double that, just to be safe.)
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